The Brooklyn Bridge, of course. (Photo: Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink)

It is beautiful from any angle, with those soaring stone towers and that intricate spiderweb of suspension cables that seem to wrap the bridge up in a kind of haze.

The grandeur is there when you walk across the bridge, even when you are surrounded by cars and tourists. The cars rumble past on either side of the wooden walking paths. The tourists trundle past just about everywhere you look.

Yesterday, a woman surrounded by three of her companions looked at a picture of the bridge she was holding in her hand. She then pointed up to the actual bridge directly in front of her, as if to confirm that the group really was in the right place. Just ahead, a tall British man was speed-walking, only to find that a pair of older women—their conversation sounded vaguely Dutch—were cramping his style. He bobbed and weaved behind them as they ambled along. Finally, he could take no more, and brusquely pushed past them with a derisive “Excuse me!” The women seemed not to notice.

Just look up! (Photo: Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink)

The high point of any suspension bridge is that moment when you get to an actual tower, and the sheer weight and heft of it looms over you. It makes sense, then, that the towers attract clusters of tourists posing for pictures and milling about.

On this day, it had attracted a horde of small children on a class field trip. They were all sitting down, munching on cheese and crackers. The kids were focused on the cheese, not the bridge. A girl yelled out “statue of cheddar cheese!” Her classmates picked up her battle cry. The children leapt in joy to say it.

This made the teachers and chaperones very jittery. “Please stay sitting down,” they started saying. “Max, Rose, can you sit down?”

The tower. (Photo: Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink)

One of the adults—a thin man with a gray beard and a yellow windbreaker—was especially agitated. “You just have to sit down for one more minute,” he kept telling the children. “And then we’re going to walk right back.” Soon enough, they did. The man in the windbreaker led them back to Brooklyn, telling them to “watch the edge, watch the edge.” The fact that they were all at least two feet too short to fall over the edge of the barriers on the path and into traffic did not comfort him.

They all made it safely to the other side. The beautiful bridge faded behind them. Ahead of them was the sign reading “Welcome To Brooklyn—How Sweet It Is!” The borough was welcoming them back with open arms, like so many millions before and after.

The Tea Party movement has come to Brooklyn, courtesy of an activist from Manhattan.

John Press is an author with a doctorate in history from New York University, who was fed up with the excesses of the Bush and especially the Obama administrations and had begun going to Tea Party events. He noticed that they were all in Manhattan. So Press talked to some Brooklyn friends who he knew were interested in the Tea Party and talked to them about starting a group there. They all told him they were too busy.

“I said, ‘OK, that means me. I’m on it,’” he said in an interview at the Bobst Library at N.Y.U. last week.

Though Press is something of an outsider in Brooklyn – he had trouble remembering the names of some of the borough’s conservative neighborhoods – his group has gained some momentum. They have their first meeting in a week, a Facebook page with over 350 members and a blog. The motto on the Facebook page reads: “Enough is enough. No more wasteful spending, no more government expansion, no more corporate bailouts. Enough with Democrats, enough with Republicans-in-Name-Only.”

It has long been known that for all of the liberalism that runs through it, Brooklyn has several decidedly conservative areas. Neighborhoods in the southeast such as Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst have traditionally voted Republican. Yet Press said that on the whole Brooklyn remains a decidedly blue state borough. “Overall, if it’s just one big area, certainly we’d lose.”

Asked what has driven him to the Tea Party, Press described his “complete disgust” at the increased government spending under George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“I don’t have any automatic allegiance to the Republicans,” he said, citing the expansive foreign policy and the bank bailouts under Bush. “A huge amount of people feel so sold out by the Republican Party.”

Still, Press said the Brooklyn Tea Party group needs to be involved in finding local candidates and influencing electoral politics – something he said makes his branch different from, say, the Staten Island branch, which is not involved in directly electoral efforts.

Press also said he’s found a way to help the Tea Party movement talk about thorny issues such as immigration. The ideas come from a book he has written, Culturism. He sees it as a way to move away from discussions of race and toward a discussion of culture.

Press’s theory is that there’s a dominant Western culture with values that must be protected. Immigration, he said, is a threat to this. Practically speaking, this means he’s less worried about people from South Korea coming to America – because he thinks their cultural values are in line with Western values – than about people coming from Latin America, whose culture he sees as not valuing education or curbs on teen pregnancy.

On April 15, Press was in Manhattan passing out fliers for the Brooklyn Tea Party at a Tax Day rally being held at Pennsylvania Station. There were many Brooklynites among the hundreds of people who turned out to the protest. Most who received them had never heard of the group until that night, and not all said they were inclined to join. However, they all expressed anger at the current state of the country.

Gregory Bronner, 34, a computer programmer, said taxes are so high it stifles innovation. “People should have freedom to achieve their dreams,” he said.

Asked if he feels alone in Brooklyn, where people may not like taxes but many do love Obama, he replied, “Oh, I’m a registered Democrat. I voted for Obama in the last election.”

Gene Otrovsky, 32, who moved from the Ukraine 20 years ago, said he thinks America is becoming a socialist nation. “It’s the same things they were doing back there, the same explanations, the same arguments.” Otrovsky, who owns an online business in the medical industry, had a flyer for the Brooklyn Tea Party in his hand, but said he’d never heard of it before the rally. He said he feels “pissed off” and would consider joining.

Some Brooklynites at the rally were recruited from Republican Party meetings, while others simply decided to show up.

“I’ve never even been to a political rally before,” said Dennis Fernando, 30, an insurance inspector who lives in Williamsburg. “I party my ass off. I have nothing in common with most of the people here.” However, Fernando did share an apprehension about what he saw as the invasive nature of the federal government.

“Fuck the government,” he said. “I want the government to get out of my life.” Fernando described himself as an anarchist but said he is wary of the Tea Party movement because he feels it has been hijacked by the Republican Party.

Anthony Rich, 40, works as a firefighter in Brownsville, where, he said, too many people are dependent on the government. “We’re headed for tyranny,” he said, adding that “some people are awakening, some are still sleeping.”

Rich, who has six children, believes in creationism, Ron Paul and self-reliance. “It will be a cold day in hell when government-dependent Americans vote for someone who loves freedom,” he said.

By Jack Mirkinson and Yepoka Yeebo

At the far southeastern edge of Brooklyn sits Dead Horse Bay. The name is an evocative, and quite literal, one. It harkens back to the 1800s, when dead horses from around New York City were sent to a lonely, remote place called Barren Island to be processed and made into things like glue and fertilizer. Because of this, the water that surrounded the island was called Dead Horse Bay.

It was not just horses that were processed on Barren Island. It was a clearinghouse for all sorts of muck, filth and grime. From the 1850s onward, trash from Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx was sent to the island, as were many kinds of dead animals. The island housed a community of around 1,500 people, who lived, worked in factories and went to school there.

Follow the arrow to Dead Horse Bay.

Not surprisingly, though, the mixture of animal corpses and all that trash created an almighty stench. As far back as 1899, the state legislature was debating how to curb the smell—and the processing facilities that produced it. In the late 1920s, the city shut down the factories and filled in the water that separated part of the island from the mainland with trash and turned it into Floyd Bennett Field, New York’s first airport.

In the 1950s, a cap on one of the containers for the landfill burst, sending trash flowing onto the beach that had been created when the land was filled in. Trash, both old and new, has continued to cascade onto the sands of Dead Horse Bay ever since.

—

Dead Horse Bay in the News

A selection of articles from the New York Times that testify to the wild and wacky place that was Barren Island. Go to Underwater New York for more information.

Legislators try to remove the stench from Barren Island.

The mystery of the cursed knickerbockers.

The New York State Assembly Chamber. (Photo courtesy Matt H. Wade/Flickr)

Brooklyn legislators continue to push back against Gov. David Paterson’s proposed budget, but they know cuts are coming.

The state budget was due last Thursday, but Paterson and the Legislature have yet to agree on a final version. The Assembly and the Senate have each passed different versions, and the two branches have been in protracted negotiations with each other and with Paterson ever since. The final contours of the budget will emerge from these closed-door discussions.

The governor, who has made reining in the state deficit a top priority, has called for drastic cuts totaling $5.5 billion in state spending. The education and health care sectors are heavily targeted. According to New York City’s Independent Budget Office, $1.3 billion of those cuts are intended for the city, a large part of which could affect its largest borough, Brooklyn. Meanwhile, the Legislature has proposed restoring $1.2 billion of the total state cuts, and continues to fight other proposed reductions. The Assembly has also approved $193 million in restorations for education expenses, but the Senate and the governor have so far rejected this proposal.

To some extent, this situation occurs every year: The governor proposes cuts, the Legislature restores some of them, and the three camps haggle over the final bill. But it has become increasingly clear to Brooklyn legislators that no matter the final budget, their constituents are likely to lose many vital services.

“It’s going to have a devastating impact on my community,” Assemblyman Alan Maisel said. “Everything is going to be affected by this, even in the best-case scenario.”

Maisel’s two priorities are state tuition grants, or TAP grants, for higher education and group homes for the elderly. The Assembly restored the TAP grants in its version, but Maisel admitted that those policies could be removed from a final version of the budget.

“We have to have a compromise,” he said. “It’s not going to be our way or the highway.”

However, compromise will not be easy because, like Maisel, every legislator will be fighting for his or her pet issues. For example, Sen. Velmanette Montgomery, chair of the Children and Families Committee, is pushing to restore money for student MetroCards, summer jobs for teenagers, and a revamping of the juvenile justice system. For Assemblyman William Boyland Jr., it is about ensuring that, at the very least, the Assembly’s levels of education spending remain in place. “We need to make sure that the numbers stay where they are, and that the money comes home,” Boyland said. “The bottom line is access to education.”

A spokesperson for Montgomery, Jim Vogel, criticized the governor’s management of the budget process, calling it “top-down management reduction.” “Most agency budgets were reduced a standard percentage of 5 to 15 percent,” he said, adding, “Some of the agencies had already absorbed multiple years of budget cuts, and further cuts would effectively end those agencies and services, which would in many cases be illegal.”

Criticism of the governor is common amongst the state’s legislators. Viola Plummer, who is chief of staff for Assemblywoman Inez Barron, said that Paterson’s cuts to CUNY and SUNY programs were “too severe,” though she could only laugh when asked if she thought all of the nearly $100 million in proposed cuts to the SUNY budget would actually be restored. Plummer’s point was echoed by Boyland, who admitted that “there isn’t much to give out” to many of his favored community organizations.

Similarly, Blair Horner, the legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, said, “We do know there will be cuts.” Horner argued that the different budgets being proposed by the Assembly, Senate, and the governor are not so dissimilar. Indeed, he estimated that around 90 percent of the final budget will “be the same across the board.”

Horner’s analysis indicates that politics may be more at work in the budget negotiations than legislators will admit. Looming over the talks is an embattled governor, battered by an ongoing criminal investigation and calls for his resignation. Many may find it politically hazardous to align themselves with the deeply unpopular Paterson. However, others deny that the governor has any bearing on their decision to support a final budget.

As Maisel put it, “Paterson has no political situation anymore,” adding, “It doesn’t exist.”

Over a year after the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—more commonly known as the stimulus bill—hundreds of billions of dollars have flowed from the government’s coffers to state and local agencies and countless community organizations. Quite a bit of that money has gone to Brooklyn.

According to ProPublica’s Recovery Tracker tool, Brooklyn has received over $400 million in stimulus funds. Carl Hum, president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview that the borough has received “more than our share” of funds in proportion to its population. This is the story of one of the organizations that has received money from the government. It is a health center called the Brownsville Multi-Service Family Health Center, or BMS, and its constant fiscal struggles have been eased—for now—by the stimulus.

by Yepoka Yeebo/ The Brooklyn Ink

The center was given two separate grants from the government; together, they total $1,079,672. BMS’s president, Harvey Lawrence, says the funds will help the center finally do things it has been wanting to do for years. More importantly, the money comes during a particularly hard time for BMS, which serves a low-income community of color in dire need of health care services.

BMS has its roots in the Brownsville Community Development Corporation, which was founded by civil rights activists in 1974 as part of a citywide anti-poverty initiative. In 1982, BCDC opened a medical center, which was staffed by one doctor, one clerk and the director, Joseph Francois. Now, the center has 260 employees. The main building, whose turquoise paint job makes it stand out amidst the housing projects that surround it, sits a few blocks away from the Rockaway Ave. subway station.  It has 27,000 square feet, but that is not enough to house the full range of services BMS provides. The center thus maintains eight satellite sites around Central Brooklyn. They cover four zip codes and serve around 20,000 people a year.

The services run the gamut, from primary and OB/GYN care to HIV/AIDS treatment to dental care to social work and counseling. The center also works with a shelter for homeless women, runs a small halfway house for substance abusers, gives parenting and job training classes, provides alternative therapies like acupuncture, and helps operate a health care-focused charter high school in Brownsville. It is not exactly an oasis in a health care desert, but it comes close.

The BMS lobby. (Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink)

Though it often flies under the radar—several schools of public health in New York City said they had never heard of BMS—the center has a prominent place in Brownsville. In an interview, Assemblyman William Boyland, who represents Brownsville, called BMS a beacon in the community. “At a time when there was no health care in Brownsville, it was the organization that took care of basic health needs,” he said. “It’s been one of the top job creators in our community for a long time.”

On a recent Thursday afternoon, the BMS lobby was filled with people. There were not enough seats to accommodate everyone, so people stood waiting to be seen by a doctor, or going in and out of the pharmacy that sits in the center of the lobby.

The population inside the center, like the population in Brownsville, was overwhelmingly black. Upstairs, Harvey Lawrence sat behind a massive desk in his office, surrounded by pictures of Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass and, of course, his wife and children. Lawrence has been at BMS since 1994, and he became the president in January of last year. Before coming to BMS, he worked at the Port Authority and as an investment banker. He speaks softly but intensely, and displays a politician’s knack for remembering names and figures, especially those involving the center he oversees.

BMS has a yearly budget of $20 million, and relies heavily on public money to cover its costs. According to Lawrence, the center gets 40% of its funding from state and city grants. The dental center, the halfway house, the women’s shelter, the HIV services—all these, and more, are funded either partially or wholly through state grants. Almost all of the remaining money comes from patient fees. Most of the people who come to BMS, though, are covered by public health programs like Medicaid, which require the government to reimburse the organization after it has already spent money. Then there are federal subsidies to cover any other patients who cannot afford to pay in full.

The center gets barely any money from philanthropic donors; Lawrence put the figure at around 1% of the BMS budget. It is difficult, he said, for BMS to attract attention from the people he calls “the folks across the river”—wealthy donors in Manhattan who, in his opinion, crave the validation of seeing their names grace a plaque in a sumptuous hospital waiting room. “If I go into the hospital, I can see my name in the lobby,” he said. “You give to us, the folks who are gonna see our name are the poor people, and unfortunately, in some places, poor people don’t count. They don’t have the same cachet.”

This adds up to a climate of almost eternal precariousness. It is like relying on a carpenter to fix a hole in your roof: if he falls through, so does the rain.  As Lawrence said, “My profit margin is so thin that if a mosquito sneezes, we get the flu.”

The last year or so has not given the center the flu, per se, but BMS has been catching colds more often. For example, the center often applies for vouchers from the New York Department of Health for various items it has spent money on. The state then reimburses BMS in full. In February, though, BMS got word from the state that it would only be paying 31% of a crucial technology voucher, and only 77% of one given to provide for services for women and children. As a result, some services had to be cut back, and Lawrence had to confront a big hole in his budget. He said he is bracing for another, more painful round of cuts in the upcoming state budget. “We’re all in a state of denial or avoidance about how this will play out,” he said.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that nearly $1.1 million in stimulus grants from the federal government was extremely welcomed—a seemingly obvious point, but one that is especially true for a cash-strapped organization like BMS.

Like any huge government undertaking, the stimulus money has been doled out of innumerable different federal, state and local agencies. In the case of BMS, the money came from a $2 billion pot given to the federal Health Resources and Services Administration to provide funding for community health centers across the country. Of that $2 billion, over $851 million has been used for so-called “Capital Improvement Projects,” or CIPs. On its  website, the HRSA says that around 1,500 health centers nationwide are getting stimulus money for “construction, repair and renovation” of their sites.

Getting the money required submitting a long list of details that the HRSA requires from its CIP grant applicants. Lawrence said the center scrambled to complete the application in time. BMS had to specify what it wanted the money for, and submit outside verification that its operations were above board. Given that just 31% of the stimulus money allocated for contracts, grants and loans has actually been paid out so far, BMS was lucky to get its funds so quickly: the bill passed on February 17th, and by March 27th, the center had an $274,298 check to cash. (Another grant, for $805,374, was given in June.) The government arrived at the specific sums by using a formula that allocates funds based on the precise number of patient visits an organization gets every year. If a center is awarded a grant, it gets a minimum of $250,000. Each patient visit is worth $35, and that sum is added to the minimum award.

So what is the money being used for? Lawrence said that the grants will allow 2,500 more people to use the center’s services.  BMS will, among other things, be able to hire an architect to expand and upgrade the space it has for clinical care, as well as add a nurse and a dietitian to its staff. In addition, the center wants to move its pharmacy to the basement, freeing up space for people to wait. BMS has to do all of this while making sure that patients—who, apart from needing vital services, also pay the bills—can still be treated during all of the new construction going on. All told, the money will create 2.6 ”FTE’s”—that is, the equivalent of 2.6 full-time, 40-hour week jobs, since the people hired will work part time.

Beyond using the stimulus money, Lawrence is trying to attract those “folks across the river” to give more money to his organization. They should realize, he said, that in such a poor area, “$100,000 really helps. $10,000 really helps. $1 really helps. Anything helps.”

Our own Vinnie Rotondaro is at the Atlantic Yards site and is sending us frequent updates:

10 AM: There is already a police presence consisting of two squad cars and five police officers along Atlantic Ave. near 4th Ave. Industrial CAT shovels are busy digging into the earth at the construction site. Pacific Street, between 6th and 5th Aves., has been cordoned off and listed as a ‘private street.’ Nearby, just outside the Atlantic Yards Community Liason office, day laborers have assembled, looking to score work on the Ratner project. ‘We want a piece of the action,’ said Bran Williams, 35, an immigrant from Jamaica.

10:56: Police officers along Atlantic Avenue said they don’t know how much, if any, protesting will take place today. Three more squad cars and what appears to be a police mobile command unit, about 20 in length, have stationed themselves on 6th Avenue between Pacific and Atlantic. A silver link chain has been festooned along the countertop at Freddy’s Bar, the site of this afternoon’s protest. No crowds have gathered yet.

12:00 PM: Two updates. Yepoka Yeebo, who is also at the ceremony, tells us that workers and construction equipment are already lined up to start working as soon as the ceremony gets through. She sends this picture of the shovels that the bigwigs will use to formally break the ground, and one with the seats reserved for Mike Bloomberg, David Paterson, Bruce Ratner and Marty Markowitz:

Which VIP will wield which shovel? (Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink)

Photo: Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink

Vinnie has this further update, on a conversation with a Brooklyn resident:

At 11:30 this morning, a small band of locals looked on at the white tent where the ceremony was set to take place. Patrick Brown, a man from Crown Heights, expressed support for the project. “It’s going to bring jobs, it should be done,” he said. Asked for his opinion on the displaced residents and store owners in the immediate area who oppose the arena’s construction, Brown said: “In this country it’s all about survival. A handful of people can’t beat the majority.” But he also said that the people losing their property should have been made shareholders in the project: “they shouldn’t have just been bought out.”

12:20: More pictures, this time of the protests that are just beginning, and another update from Vinnie:

At 12:07, two medium Peavey amplifiers and a harp were produced outside Freddy’s Bar. A man wearing an oversized Marty Markowitz mask walked out of the bar’s front door, hamming it up for the reporters at the scene. (At this point, the press outnumbered the protesters.) A plastic bag full of dirt was brought out and dumped in front of a poster reading “Groundbreaking to bury the soul of Brooklyn: Here Lies Brooklyn’s Soul, 1896-2010.”

Photo: Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink

Just a few of the protesters' targets. (Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink)

"Bloomberg" and "Paterson" talk to the press. (Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink)

1:01 PM: The protest has been going on for about a half-hour now. We’ll be getting you updates as soon as possible, and we’ll be bringing you a video report, a written report and a story that places the entire Atlantic Yards project in historical context. Just keep checking in!

1:13 PM: More from Vinnie, at the protests: At 12:30, a thoroughly sarcastic press conference held in front of Freddy’s bar began. Men and women wearing bobblehead poster masks of Borough president Marty Markowitz, Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and others, gave faux speeches to a group of 40 to 50 protesters. Daniel Goldstein, of Develop Don’t Destroy, took the mic. He wore no mask. “This is a 22-acre, no-bid land grab,” Goldstein said. “This is a celebration of eminent domain, a money-losing arena, a bait and switch…this is a celebration of everything that should not be celebrated.” After Goldstein’s speech, the protesters made their way down to the dignitaries’ entrance to the groundbreaking ceremony at 6th Ave. and Pacific and began chanting, “Shame on you.” (UPDATE: Scroll to the bottom to see a picture of Goldstein speaking, and other pictures from Vinnie at the rally. We do it all!)

1:34 PM: Yepoka Yeebo says that, as the groundbreaking ceremony officially begins, the protest has heated up, with hundreds of people in the streets. People are right behind the fence where the dirt mound for the groundbreaking has been set up, and traffic has been completely tied up. Vinnie caught a debate between two Brooklyn residents a little earlier, and sent this along:

Outside the dignitaries’ entrance, a shouting match broke out between a Brooklyn-born black man and a protesting white woman who had moved to Brooklyn from elswhere. “I speak for a place I’ve lived 15 years in,” the woman said. “We’re getting our jobs back,” the man countered. “We’re the Brooklyn born. You just moved over here.” Pulled aside for an interview, the man, Athony Taylor, a 50-year-old Crown heights resident, further explained his gripe with the protestors. “They don’t know the whole story,” he said. “We’ve lost thousands of jobs in the past: the Daily News, the chocolate factory, even the meat market we lost. The city said were gonna get those jobs replaced. Now it’s time.”

Photo: Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink

Photo: Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink

Photo: Yeebo/The Brooklyn Ink

2:19: While the Ink is outside with protesters, the actual ceremony is happening inside that swanky tent we showed you earlier. We couldn’t make it back into the event, because we didn’t have the proper credentials. (Insert grumbling about the Man here.) But local blog Curbed does have a front row seat, and their very entertaining take on the proceedings is here. Every politician is making a speech, and Jay-Z has a row of seats reserved entirely for him.

2:35: The ceremony is still going on, speech after speech after effusive speech. Our Van Tieu tells us that the protesters are now mere meters away from the site where the pols and bigwigs will officially break the ground. It should make for a bit of an awkward moment when the dignitaries venture out of the tent and pick up their shovels.

2:45: The last entry from the ever-intrepid, ever-resourceful Vinnie Rotondaro. According to him, at least one protester has been arrested:

At 2:20, police directed the protesters away from the tent, back towards 6th Avenue, and begin unfurling an orange “do not cross” mesh fence. Protesters continued to make noise; some hung off the chain link fence and fanned out along the sidewalk on Atlantic Avenue. A protester beating a boran–a traditional Irish drum– was handcuffed and taken away by two officers. Police instructed the rest to stop blowing whistles and banging drums.

2:54: Here’s a NY1 report on the ceremony so far. And we’ve got a slideshow of Ink pictures of the scene on our home page. Go there, won’t you?

This is probably a good time to remind you of what, exactly, the fuss is all about. Our Sierra Brown has a great recap of both the magnitude and the controversial nature of the Atlantic Yards project here. Just one fact is, in some ways, sufficient to convey the scale of what we are talking about: Atlantic Yards is the largest development project in the entire city, other than the project to rebuild the World Trade Center. (That’s courtesy of the Times, by the way.) Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that the project marks a profound turning point in the history of the borough.

3:20: And…they did it! Many shovels went ceremoniously into the soft dirt, and the Atlantic Yards project is officially underway. Click here for more pictures. And so it was that a new day in the history of Brooklyn arrived. How it ultimately will affect the borough is something we can’t predict with certainty today. What we can do is bring you more coverage, which we will have for you shortly. There will be a video report from the protest, and a rich, context-filled, historically-minded slice of analytical cake from our own Mustafa Mehdi Vural. Keep checking back, and thanks for following us today!

Daniel Goldstein, who spoke at the protest rally. (Rotondaro/The Brooklyn Ink)

Photo: Rotondaro/The Brooklyn Ink

Photo: Rotondaro/The Brooklyn Ink

Menesky Magloire leads Brooklyn College students in a discussion on institutional racism. (Photo: Mirkinson/ The Brooklyn Ink)

At 9:30 this morning, a Brooklyn College student, who would only identify himself as Dave Solidarity, was handing out fliers and telling people walking past him to skip class and join him in a student strike. The aim was to protest Gov. David Paterson’s proposed cuts to the higher education budget. Paterson is proposing an $84.3 million cut from the CUNY budget for the 2011-2012 academic year, as well as a $5.3 million midyear cut in 2010.

“No class today!” Solidarity called out. This drew the ire of Milga Morales, the dean of student affairs at the college. After a few minutes, she walked up to Solidarity. She had a problem, she told him, with the way he was talking to students.

“You’re misinforming students,” she said. “You can tell them to walk out, that’s fine, but you can’t tell them that there’s no classes.” Asked by a reporter if she supported the strike, Morales said, “We’re aware of it.”

The walkout, which was organized by a number of students, seemed to have a good deal of institutional support. The teachers’ union was backing it, and the organizers had been given access to several rooms in the student center for gathering. Passing by Solidarity, Barbara Barnes, a professor in the School of Education, said she had told all of her students to skip her class and strike instead. “We’re immediately affected,” she said. “The cuts are devastating.”

The strike today was a far cry from the acrimonious scene Wednesday night when four people were arrested at a public hearing about MTA cuts at the Brooklyn Museum. Yet both highlight the rising public clamor against the budget cuts. In addition, today’s strike was one of a series of similar protests from students across the country.

After all the fliers had been handed out, Solidarity and two other organizers went into Boylan Hall to try to get more students to leave class and come to the student center for a series of talks, workshops and film screenings. They walked into an English class, where the professor greeted them excitedly. She had just been talking about the budget cuts and the strike with her students, a group of mostly freshman girls. It turned out that half the class had heard about the strike beforehand. Joined by the class, the two started debating whether the strike was necessary and what could be done to close the budget gaps. Solidarity said that money could be spent on education instead of prisons or bank bailouts, a notion the professor seemed to greet with skepticism.

The students appeared supportive enough. After all, they — or their parents — potentially face looming tuition increases and cuts to financial aid. One girl said she was worried about the MTA cuts, as well. “It doesn’t just affect students,” she said. “It’s parents, it’s workers, too.”

After 15 minutes or so, the debate petered out, and the entire class immediately got up and headed for the student center, seemingly without permission from their teacher. “What was she talking about unions for?” a girl said to her friend as they walked down the hall. “We tried to get out but she just kept going on!”

They all walked to the student center, where multiple workshops on such topics as “Institutional Racism” and “People, Power and Politics” were being held. Many professors had joined Barbara Barnes in sending their students to the workshops instead of to their classes. Every workshop was filled with people, debating whether or not it is possible to ignore someone’s race, or the gap between the salary of the college’s president — $580,000, according to a professor in one workshop — and the budget crisis. People talked about creating student-led classes and making the workshops into a more permanent occurrence. Then it was time for lunch, to be followed by more workshops, a rally on campus and a trek into Manhattan. There, the Brooklyn contingent was slated to join students from all over the city to continue protesting the cuts in front of the governor’s New York City office on 41st Street.

UPDATE: A ‘Restore Student MetroCards’ petition is being tweeted far and wide.
The last MTA hearing is at 6pm at FIT at 7th and 27th in Manhattan.
A rally is planned for 4pm at Governor Paterson’s office at 633 Third Avenue and 41st Street in Manhattan.

The Brownsville Recreation Center takes basketball seriously. When you walk in, one of the first things you see, nestled in between the fish tank and the cage for Juliet the lizard, is a cluster of large trophies celebrating moments of glory.

The basketball court is right at the front of the building, too. At 1:05 this afternoon, about 10 people sat in the otherwise empty stands watching a man in a blue jersey talking to a woman and a cameraman who was filming him. The cameraman was decked out in full hipster regalia: plastic frames, plaid shirt, tight pants. The woman had long dark hair, a magenta scarf and a wide smile.

The Brownsville Recreation Center takes basketball seriously. (Photo by Matthew Huisman)

This was part of a promotional campaign by the department store Kmart. The store has its own line of shoes and apparel, called Protegé. Kmart is sponsoring a coming streetball tournament, in which the players will wear Protegé shoes and Protegé jerseys.

The player in front of the camera was Aaron Williams. He said his nickname was “The Problem.” The cameraman bantered with him, asking him questions, like what his favorite move on the court was, or what he liked most about streetball. The woman stood by, smiling and texting on her phone. At one point, she moved a table that was in front of Williams, explaining that she wanted to see “his full ensemble.” She pronounced it “on-som-blay.” In the stands, two other men waited to be filmed, a stash of orange shoeboxes strewn around them.

The gym walls are covered with murals. Paintings of civil rights heroes, like Rosa Parks, share space with images of two Dianas — Diana Ross and the Princess of Wales. There is a giant skull with basketballs tumbling out of the mouth. One of the paintings shows a smiling, middle-aged black man in a grey sweatshirt, holding a basketball. The director turned to one of the men sitting in the stands and asked, “Who’s in that picture?”

“Steve Harvey,” the man said, then added, not entirely keeping a straight face, “He used to play ball here.” (Steve Harvey, it should be noted, grew up in West Virginia and Ohio.)

The woman’s face lit up. “I knew it!” she said. “I knew it.” She turned to the cameraman and said, “Hey, it is Steve Harvey. I told you it looked like him. He used to play ball here!” By this time, the people in the stands were laughing. One pointed to another picture on the wall and said, “Yeah, and that’s Jay-Z.” The woman noticed none of this. One of the men waiting to be filmed got a basketball started shooting hoops with Williams. The woman kept her focus on them as they passed the ball back and forth in their Protégé clothes and shoes.

By Jack Mirkinson

On September 2, 2005, Robin Lyde was upstairs in bed when she heard the gunfire. It sounded close enough that she raced downstairs to check that the children playing in the living room were alright. They were unharmed. Then someone started yelling to her that her son Benny had been shot.

“I thanked God that the bullet didn’t come in my house and didn’t hit any of my children just to step outside the house and see that all of my kids didn’t dodge it,” she said, sitting in her living room over four years later with Benny’s father, Carlton Scott, next to her.

She ran to Benny’s side and started calling him. He was lying on the ground and did not respond. He had slipped into a coma from which he would never emerge. He died three months later. He was 21.

Benny Lyde, who was killed four years ago.

The police determined that he had been shot in retaliation for something in which he was not involved. A friend had beaten someone up; that person’s friend couldn’t find him, so he found Benny instead.

That was in 2005. This year, Benny Lyde has been officially memorialized by the city of New York. In September, the block in Crown Heights where he was shot, and where his family still lives, was renamed “Benny A. Lyde Place.” Hundreds of people turned up at the naming ceremony where Benny was recalled as a young man who spent time tutoring children and helping people learn to read. State Senator Eric Adams, who represents Crown Heights, has talked about founding a Benny Lyde Institute, a building to house programs where children help other children.
But another matter is more pressing. The man accused of killing Benny Lyde is scheduled to go on trial. Cody Nelson, an army medic and veteran of the Iraq War, says he is innocent.

Remembering

Robin Lyde and Carlton Scott speak of their son as a young man with a “little old soul.”  He was the sort of child who would lie down next to his mother in her bed and ask her how she was doing. He helped with the bills when his parents were having trouble making ends meet.

He liked to plan ahead. When he was ten, his parents told him they would get him a car if he graduated from high school. He told them that by then  technology would have leaped ahead so much that they could get him a flying car. “This ain’t the Jetsons!” Robin told him. Benny, she said, just kept thinking about what type of flying car he was going to get. He settled for a black Altima.

When he was 12 he told his mother that he would be America’s first black president— this was, of course, well before the coming of Barack Obama. He cautioned her about her behavior in public, lest her actions come back to haunt his future political career.

He liked to play chess. He would play for hours at night with his father, sometimes until three in the morning. Benny was so good that his father would get annoyed when his wife would come downstairs to talk with him — he needed to focus completely on the game to avoid being outsmarted by his son.

Benny would travel to Brownsville and East New York to teach reading and to help at after-school programs. When people talked with his mother about a great kid they knew she would realize with surprise that they were talking about her son.

He went to Long Island University in Brooklyn and majored in accounting and business management. He wanted to run a business before he got into politics.

His parents said he liked to party, but not too much. Robin remembered seeing him break off from a group of friends to come back home one night. Benny told his friends he would go back to the party they had come from. They said he always told them that, but it never happened. “You’re not coming back schoolboy!” his friends chided him. “Somebody’s gotta be the CEO to hire you!” he laughed back.

Investigating

For two-and-a-half years the police searched for his killer. Their investigation took them all over the country.  Meanwhile, Robin and Carlton talked seriously about leaving Crown Heights. Their children—especially Benny’s younger brother Prince, who was inseparable from him—were reeling. Looking at his brother lying in the hospital, Prince said that doing the right thing “didn’t pay off.”

But the family decided to stay. Leaving, they reasoned, would be a rejection of the way they had tried to live their lives. But they still needed to know who had killed their son. “As a family, we were not going to sit here and wallow in sorrow,” Robin said. “We needed answers, and we were stepping out to get them.”

They talked to everyone they could find: community board meetings, block associations, television stations, local officials, all asking the same thing: please come forward if you know something.

Initially, Carlton said, the police thought it was just another drug or gang-related case. The underlying thought, he said, was that Benny could not have been completely innocent.

“They thought that because my kids drive big cars with every little gadget in them they had to be doing something wrong,” he said. “It was an insult,” Robin added.

Carlton said that as the years went on, police tried to label the investigation a cold case, meaning that they would stop actively looking for the perpetrator. It was community pressure that kept them from doing so, he said. The police told the family that people kept calling them up and asking them what they were doing to catch Benny’s killer. So they kept looking.

The NYPD said it could not comment on the details of the case because of the upcoming trial. Finally, on March 6, 2008, they arrested Cody Nelson. He was the same age as Benny at the time of the shooting, and grew up two blocks away.

Cody Nelson

Little is known about Cody Nelson. He and his family refused to be interviewed for this article. What is known can be gleamed from court records and news accounts. He was a member of the 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum in upstate New York. He served in Iraq as a medic in 2004, treating both Iraqi and American soldiers. His lawyer, Joseph Ostrowsky, said that, as far as he knows, Nelson had a clean record until his time in the Army. He said he was trying to get Nelson’s records from his days as a soldier to see what psychological effects his service may have had on him.
Upon his return, Nelson began to get into trouble. In 2006, he spent a stint in jail for assault and robbery. That same year, he stabbed a 16-year-old boy at a high school basketball game in Watertown, the town where Fort Drum is located.

He was sentenced to two to four years in prison.

Those crimes occurred while Nelson was still attached to the base at Fort Drum. Prosecutors contend that he shot Benny Lyde while he was on leave from the Army in 2005. Ostrowsky would not discuss the specifics of the defense he intends to make, but he said it was possible Nelson was not even in Brooklyn at the time of the shooting.

Mourning

Robin Lyde has become a powerhouse in her neighborhood. She shows up each month to the Community Board 8 meetings and works the room like a politician, laughing and kibbitzing with all the people she has come to know. She has work and a family and a hole in her heart that the passage of time does not fill.

The first thing she thinks of when she remembers her son is this: he never forgot to give her a kiss when he left the house. It is the thing she says she misses the most from him. The last moment Robin shared with Benny before he was shot was the kiss he gave her on his way out the door.

“When I wake up in the morning, I get the kiss from my husband, I get it from my children,” she said. “I don’t get it from him.”